I walked out the door and into my skin, a tougher one that somehow seems softer in the folds, inside the creases where I kept my sweetest memories...

The kid and I watched a documentary on origami and the essence of what it is – the art of folding. The most delicately intricate designs can be made from just one piece of uncut paper by simply folding it over and over and over again. Sometimes the origami artist has first created, mathematically, a map of how he will proceed, while at other times he just begins folding and sees what he comes up with organically. And after what may sometimes be hours of tedious work, he just might get to the end of his design, feel perfectly pleased by it, and then unfold the entire thing in order to see exactly how he got there.

It occurred to me how life is sort of like that. We are constantly folding over pieces of ourselves, like a rubber spatula cutting through thick, rich cake batter, as we arc forward into what our next experience will be, toward the next moment that always finds us folding into the next and then the next… until we decide to take a look back at where we’ve been. Surfaces smoothed over, finished out. Lines of connectivity along the way.

And then we just keep going.

I realized the other night that I felt empty. What was it? I wondered. Was it the quiet house or was it just my low energy level? Could it be the fact I haven’t had sex in months? Or maybe it was because I had forgotten, once again, to eat dinner? Empty. Something that by its very essences is nothing can be so very consuming, can’t it?